Selling Mario Balotelli would improve Roberto Mancini’s position at Manchester City

The Premier League Owl

Since the world seems determined to judge Roberto Mancini on perception rather than reality, it’s going to be important from now on how everything looks at Manchester City from the outside. Apparently, a couple of poor performances in Europe render winning the Premier League an irrelevance. It’s nonsense, but the press seem determined to have their story here.

Dressing room unrest, Pep Guardiola and Sheik Mansour spending time together on a yacht somewhere…lots of conspiracy theories are marching in City’s direction, and it will get extremely dull very quickly.

Anyway…

Mario Balotelli is a weakness for Roberto Mancini. Even before he’d left Inter Milan, Balotelli had a ‘don’t touch with a bargepole’ sticker slapped on his forehead, and Mancini is one of very European managers who would have spent as much as he did on the forward.

Balotelli is obviously talented, but so much of his input at City is theoretical, and as such the majority of coverage he does receive is not centred around what he does on a football pitch. Fireworks, tee-shirts, sulking…that’s the Balotelli digest. To be fair, the behaviour has been reined in over the last six months, but to outsiders, he’s still a player who appears to be more trouble than he’s worth - and his place in the Manchester City squad is a convenient stick with which to beat Mancini.

There’s obviously a special relationship between manager and player here, one with far more elasticity than the usual coach/athlete dynamic. That’s fine, but every moody gesture and every storm off the pitch is now going to be scrutinised more than ever before - the media are actively looking for signs that Mancini has lost the dressing room, and Balotelli’s continued public displays of petulance just give them more excuses to write negatively.

Sensible people don’t believe Balotelli to be a real issue, but ultimately that doesn’t really matter. Eventually, no matter how rich the owner is, the derogatory stories become a self-fulfilling prophecy and the manager’s position becomes increasingly untenable. How many times have we seen that process with Chelsea?

For Mancini, his job is now part-football manager, part public relations manager. Chopping Balotelli out of his squad and selling him on would give a ‘cleaner’ impression of life at City - there aren’t any other players, Carlos Tevez aside, who have a history of creating trouble.

Then you have the actual football issue: is Balotelli actually an asset to this City team? Yes, he comes on and occasionally changes a game, but the ratio of that kind of impact versus the ineffectual posturing that has become his trademark is not necessarily in his favour. You have to think about it in these terms: would a player purchased with the revenue from Balotelli’s sale contribute more to this team. The answer has to be yes, and given the imminence of FFP, City and Mancini need to be making those kind of decisions.

It’s a tricky one, and I know that all sounds fairly convoluted, but it would do more good than harm to Mancini’s City life expectancy if Balotelli was allowed to leave.